Every continent once hosted vast native grasslands, kept free of trees by lightning fires. Bison roamed the Prairies, deer grazed the Pampas, the Veldts supported wildebeest and Australia’s grasslands supported kangaroos.
But no landscape is a still life – it is a continual battle between trees and grasses for soil space and access to solar energy.
With closer settlement, fires are no longer eradicating woody weeds from our grasslands. Old journals, sketches and photos show that there are now more trees in Australian grasslands than there were 100 years ago. Many properties can document substantial tree invasion even since the first aerial photos were taken in the 1950’s.
This invasion of our ancestral grasslands by eucalypt weeds is now encouraged by the Kyoto inspired bans on vegetation clearing.
If governments want to turn back the vegetation clock, they should be removing buildings, farms and infrastructure from the once forested coastal areas to allow native forests to re-establish. But this would lose too many votes. Politicians know they can win more votes from urban tree huggers than will be lost from a few grass farmers. So they legislate for more trees in grasslands.
Cynical vote buying
Man’s food supply comes not from trees such as eucalypts. Our grasslands support grazing animals and cultivated crops - they are the world’s food baskets. These bans are destroying Australia’s capacity to produce food which will show up in the cities as rising food prices and declining jobs.
The bans have no basis in science, no long term effect on greenhouse gases but they destroy the grassland environment. They are cynical vote buying which should be immediately abandoned.
If not, we will soon reach the vegetation tipping point where we can’t see the grass for the trees.
For a fuller discussion of “Grasses, Trees, Climate and Food” (PDF):
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
